Catholics across the Diocese of Brooklyn are commemorating the Blessed Mother’s assumption into heaven.
The Knights of Columbus remembered their founder, Blessed Michael McGivney, on Sunday at the Co-Cathedral of St. Joseph.
The Vatican is still investigating whether a miracle happened at a church where Father McGivney once served as pastor.
Sister Jessica Castillo took her first profession of vows with the Salesian Sisterhood in New Jersey.
By Jessica Easthope
There’s no avenue Najmah Nash hasn’t explored in search of justice. This job she’s taken on is still new, but she’s in it for the long run.
“I have a hashtag on Instagram, no days off,” Nash said. “This is what I’m doing all day every day, this is my life.”
What she wants sounds simple, for school buses transporting children with disabilities to be safer.
She wants drivers and monitors to do their jobs undistracted and for their equipment to be regularly inspected.
But, more than anything, she wants what happened to her 6-year-old daughter, Fajr, to never happen again.
Fajr was on her way to summer camp in Somerset County, New Jersey, on July 17, when her bus hit a series of bumps and she slumped over in her wheelchair.
Fajr was strangled by her wheelchair’s harness.
It’s a flashback she can’t stop replaying.
“The woman on the phone is now crying and I realize this is serious,” Nash recalls. “Something really went wrong with my child in such little time.”
Fajr had Emanuel Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder causing physical and developmental disabilities, which would make it impossible to pick herself back up.
“It was the worst day of my life,” Nash said. “I received a call around 9/10 AM that Fajr arrived at Claremont Elementary School unresponsive. I just started screaming asking her, “What do you mean?”
Fajr started flailing and shrieking, and even kicked the window of the bus, according to court documents.
However, the monitor hired to watch her was facing the front of the bus and on the phone, wearing earbuds.
By the time she got to school, Fajr was dead.
“They were working on my child for an hour,” Nash said. “I talked to her and I prayed to her and everything else, I can’t put into words.”
Visions of paramedics performing CPR on Wali Williams’ lifeless daughter are burned into his head.
He said as scared as he was in that moment, what sickened him was how scared Fajr must have been in her last moments.
“Me picturing what was happening to her in that moment, it bugs me out,” Williams said. “I have to close my eyes and change my train of thought. Watching them do CPR was painful for me, she’s fragile. When I think about her fighting for her life and the bus driver on her phone it makes me angry.”
Wali isn’t the only angry parent who’s lost a child the same way.
In Florida, a 14 year old girl with cerebral palsy suffocated to death while on a school bus in 2018. The bus monitor was sitting in front of her but didn’t notice until it was too late.
In that same year, a 20 year old Detroit student with autism died after having a seizure on his school bus. The driver called 911 but didn’t help him up after he fell over in his wheelchair, and was wedged in between the seats with his airway restricted.
A second grader in Florida turned blue and stopped breathing while suffering a medical episode on her school bus in 2012. The bus driver nor the aide called 911.
Maggie Moroff, The Senior Special Education Policy Coordinator at Advocates For Children Of New York, fields complaints daily from families with disabled children.
“It’s a whack-a-mole game,” Maggie Mora, a senior special education policy coordinator at Advocates For Children of New York, said. “You deal with one problem and then another one pops up a few weeks later.”
Mora said it would take more than laws or federal regulations to stop this from happening.
“There isn’t enough staff to staff up the buses and support the kids,” Mora said. “There isn’t sufficient training, so even if the legislation was in place there would still be these problems. It’s not that the will isn’t there, it’s that the way isn’t there.”
For Nash, who has been reaching out to politicians and other elected officials, she has yet to see that will. So far, no one has called her back.
“I haven’t received a response from no one statewide, no one locally, no senators, no governors, no councilmen or women,” she said.
Nash, Williams, and other activists would like to see an overhaul of the transportation for children with special needs on school buses, new safety protocols and strict repercussions for employee violations.
Montauk Transit, the bus company responsible with transporting Fajr, has already had its contract with the Franklin Township Board of Education renewed for the 2023 – 2024 school year, but Nash is asking for it to be terminated immediately.
Both Nash and Williams refuse to accept silence as an answer. Their efforts to get Fajr’s law petition into the hands of lawmakers won’t be in vain, they said.
“This is Fajr’s legacy, it’s hard to say because that’s my daughter,” Nash said. “But my faith is what’s keeping me head level. This is for all other children, this is Fajr’s legacy, so look forward to phone calls, the time is now we can’t wait for another tragedy.”
If you would like to help Fajr’s Law into the hands of legislatures, you can sign a petition on https://www.change.org/p/fajr-s-law.
Najmah Nash wants to change a system that’s long been scrutinized for negligence; transportation for children with disabilities.
By Katie Vasquez
McCarren park is a long-time summer staple in both the Williamsburg and Greenpoint sections of Brooklyn, but this year, it looks a little different.
If you ask residents in the area, it’s probably because the park’s recreation center is now serving as a shelter for 55 migrant men.
Some park-goers like Logan Emerson are concerned.
“I was just curious how safe the conditions are for the asylum seekers,” Emerson said. “[I’m] less concerned about us locally and more concerned about their accommodations and making sure that they’re getting what they need from us as a community.”
For one park-goer who wished to stay anonymous, the city’s placement of the shelter in the neighborhood isn’t a good idea.
She believes officials should reconsider how they allocate money to the migrant crisis, given the expensive cost.
“They give them food and it goes in the trash because they’re accustomed to eating [it],” she said. “So, you’re wasting taxpayer dollars on all these people and they’re just being very ungrateful.”
It’s just one of the latest attempts by the city to help the ever-growing flow of migrants being bussed into the big apple.
Since spring of 2022, the mayor’s office estimates the city has received nearly 100,000 migrants, with more than half of them, 57,000, are in New York’s shelter system.
“I have stated for sometime we need help,” Mayor Adams said. “This is a national crisis and should be handled by national resources and policies.”
This wasn’t the first plea Adams has made. The mayor has been calling for help for months, and has stated that the migrant crisis would cost the city as much as $12 billion.
The mayor finally had a closed-door meeting on Thursday with a white house official, but it remains to be seen if that meeting will materialize into helping the city.
“I guess you just have to find the places that you can help these people out but I think also at the same time too the con of it is that there are also people already. Living in the city that need help and where is the help for those folks?”
The Biden Administration has claimed it has gotten tough on immigration, but according to homeland security at least 2.6 million migrants have crossed the border in the last two years.
Catholic Charities Hawai’i in the Honolulu Diocese has appealed for donations to help the agency meet the housing, food and other needs of what could be thousands of victims from wildfires raging on the island of Maui that wiped out an entire town and drove people to seek refuge in the ocean.
News reports said that wildfires also were affecting the Big Island (officially named Hawaii), and by mid-afternoon Eastern time Aug. 10, crews continued to battle what authorities said were a total of three fires.
McCarren Park has set up cots for around 50 adult migrants who have access to hot food and the park’s facilities.
U.S. Bishops are speaking out against President Biden’s proposal for the pregnant workers fairness act.
The death toll rises as fire continues to engulf the Hawaiian island.
Proposed regulations from the Biden administration to implement a piece of legislation designed to enhance workplace protections for pregnant women has drawn the ire of the U.S. bishops, as they charge the regulations could contain language to advance abortion.
Passed by the U.S. Senate late last year and by the U.S. House in 2021, the bipartisan “Pregnant Workers Fairness Act” requires employers to provide accommodations to qualified workers for pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions.
Examples of accommodations include: Receiving closer parking, flexible hours, additional break time, and excusals from strenuous activities. As passed, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act doesn’t include anything related to abortion.
However, on Aug. 7, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) released proposed regulations for implementing the legislation that adds abortion as a reasonable accommodation.
By Jessica Easthope
Driving around Astoria is something Father Allan Basilio and Benita Herrera do often during the summer.
They’re bringing communion to the sick and homebound parishioners of Immaculate Conception Church in Astoria, Queens. It’s a job that’s given Herrera, a Eucharistic minister and volunteer at the church, a sense of purpose.
“He makes me feel like I’m important to him and the church,” Herrera said. “I always think that I am not worthy and I can’t do things and Father Allan trusted me.”
It might not look like it, but Father Basilio is on vacation. It’s the same trip he’s taken every summer for two decades. It’s the type of rest and change of pace that feeds his soul.
“Actually this is my vacation time,” Father Basilio said. “Vacation for me is different people, different environment, different culture. I would like to sometimes go away from my regular routine in the parish, so this is a challenge and opportunity for me.”
But Father Basilio is only visiting.
Back home in the Philippines, he’s the Vicar General for the Diocese of Virac, the moderator of the Curia, a teacher and a pastor of St. John the Baptist church.
Here at Immaculate Conception he just gets to be a priest of the people.
“I have a soft spot for this parish,” Father Basilio said. “I love the parishioners, I love the priests of course. I’m celebrating my 30th anniversary in November and half of my priestly life has been spent here. I consider this place and my second home, my second family away from home.”
Herrera became one of those people early on.
“It’s like I saw him yesterday like he never went, he’s always here in our lives, I think he’s praying for us over there that’s why we feel that way.”
For Herrera, Father Basilio is a spiritual advisor, confidant and friend.
“If she has a problem she will approach me and ask for counseling,” Father Basilio said. “She will always look forward to me coming to this place.”
“He helps me pray for my kids,” Herrera said. “I have three boys and not everything is perfect as I wish it could be but Father Allan helps me pray for them always and I know God hears his prayers.”
Father Jim Huges, the Associate Pastor at Immaculate Conception, said in the two summers he’s seen Father Basilio in action, he can understand why people are drawn to him.
“The priesthood is an action,” Father Huges said. “It’s what’s in your heart, whether you’re on vacation or in the office, it’s ‘how do you share that with everybody’ and I think he has a gift for that. His style of priesthood I think it’s amazing.”
Father Huges said having visiting priests like Father Basilio is invaluable for priests and parishioners.
“We learn from them as much as they learn from us,” Father Huges said. “For the people it gives them a sense of this is church. “It’s totally inclusive and I think it can help them dream [that] I can be part of this. I don’t have to be an observer, I can be part of this.”
Over the last 20 years Father Basilio says he’s seen the parish and community change.
“There are a lot of new buildings here, who passed away, who’s moving out, who’s moving into the parish,” Father Basilio said. “I see the growth of the faith community and I’m so lucky because I journey with them.”
Kidnappers in Haiti released an American nurse and her daughter nearly two weeks after they were abducted at gunpoint in the country’s capital, Port-au-Prince.
Alix Dorsainvil from New Hampshire was working as the community nurse for El Roi Haiti, a humanitarian Christian ministry, when she and her child were abducted from their campus on July 27.
She is the wife of the group’s founder, Sandro Dorsainvil. They were released on Aug. 8, according to a statement by El Roi Haiti on Aug. 10.
What began three years ago as The Tablet’s “COVID Relief Fundraiser for Catholic Schools” will be back in September, allowing all participating schools and their students in the Diocese of Brooklyn to directly benefit from the campaign by earning cash.
Students will be challenged to sell or renew subscriptions to The Tablet newspaper, and more than 80% of funds raised will be distributed to the students and their schools.